


Minutes That Pass Outside Your Timeline

by SincerelyChaos



Series: Floodgates 'verse [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Developing Relationship, Dissociation, Domestic, Flashbacks, Fragments from different stages of the relationship, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Nightmares, One Shot, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-05
Updated: 2015-04-05
Packaged: 2018-03-21 10:31:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3688893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SincerelyChaos/pseuds/SincerelyChaos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are minutes that pass outside of John's timeline, and John will never know these minutes. </p><p>Sherlock will know more about these minutes; he can often watch them as they pass by, but neither man can tell what happens in John's mind during these minutes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Minutes That Pass Outside Your Timeline

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place during and after A Study in Floodgates, and consists of three fragments from different stages of the developing relationship. Written in a slightly lighter tone than Floodgates, but see tags for possible trigger warnings.
> 
> * * *
> 
> I am not a native English speaker and is therefore ever so thankful to my wonderful beta iriswallpaper, who continues to encourage me, edit my language and make me feel confident enough to post things in The English Language.

The memory of sounds enters his mind before he’s fully awake.

Perhaps it was screaming, or maybe it was just the distressed breathing next to him that made him surface from his sleep. Had there been screaming? He’s not sure, his memory data is corrupted due to the unavoidable contamination from dreams that can occur after a sudden awakening.

John’s taking shallow breaths, almost hyperventilating. The breathing is irregular and every other breath holds something that sound almost like a suppressed sob.

 _Tachypnea_. More than twenty-five breaths a minute.

It seems highly unlikely that John should be awake and crying, but Sherlock tries to turn around slowly, as if he’s still asleep, just in case. He faces John and lies absolutely still for a few seconds before he peers through his eyelashes and tries to get a look at John’s face.

In the dim light from the window where they forgot to draw the blinds last night, Sherlock can only make out one of John’s eyes, the other one is shadowed and seems to just fade into the darkness that obscures more than half of John’s face. The visible eye is halflidded and fluttering.

Sherlock keeps his own breathing shallow and a bit more rapid than usual. The minute ventilation of an adult male is always decreased during all stages of sleep, but the breathing pattern is still faster than when you’re awake. People tend to miss this when they pretend to be asleep. Clearly, Sherlock will not make such an insipid mistake whilst pretending to be asleep next to a doctor.

The pupil is barely visible under John’s half closed eyelid, but the iris is making short rapid movements like in deep REM sleep.

Letting himself take deeper breathes again, Sherlock lies still and just observes. John is nowhere near conscious and Sherlock feels nowhere near sleeping.

John’s arm is tensing.

Relaxing. Tensing.

Sherlock can’t see his hand, it’s somewhere under the duvet that covers half of John, but he sees the muscles and knows that his hand must be repeatedly forming a fist.

John’s naked but his bullet wound is obscured by the shadows; John rests on his injured shoulder. It’s a shame, really, Sherlock would like to look closer now that John is asleep and can’t be self-conscious about it. He’s seen it a few times but this is only the second time they’ve actually fallen asleep together, naked, and he might not get another chance, nothing is certain at this point.

Sherlock’s throat is sore from the night’s rough fucking. The sense memory is immediate as he swallows and feels the dull ache, it goes right down to his nether regions and he feels the swelling, he’s half hard in a manner of seconds. If he focuses, he can almost feel the weight of John’s hands on his clavicles, being held down as John is…

_Flap._

John’s arm almost hits Sherlock’s ribs as he suddenly jolts in his sleep.

Sherlock lies absolutely still as the body next to him trembles, then relaxes.

It shouldn’t be possible. Now that he thinks about it, neither should the tensing of John’s arm earlier. REM sleep causes paralysis. John shouldn’t move other muscles than those in his eyes.

With renewed interest, Sherlock focuses his gaze on John but John is now on his back, making the scar visible but the eyes are now in the wrong angle for Sherlock to see them. Intrigued, Sherlock rises on his elbow to study John’s face.

John's pupils are more visible now and they are still doing rapid, short movements. The thing that’s not right about the whole scene is that John’s facial muscles seems to tense every other second. They shouldn’t do that while John’s in REM sleep.

Could John be having a seizure?

Sherlock doesn’t think about it, just rolls himself half on top of John, pressing his now failing erection to his friend's thigh.

There’s no reaction.

Sherlock rolls off, then puts his hand on John’s shoulder and shakes.

Still no reaction. John’s body’s pliant under his hand, moves with Sherlock’s movements.

Finally, Sherlock just calls John’s name, aiming to sound impatient and bored. He continues to shake John’s shoulder, increasingly rough.

Now John’s eyes are opening but as Sherlock meets his eyes, he sees that they’re still flickering and moving, there’s no presence or wakefulness in them. It’s odd, really, but then nothing about the man in front of him is normal, despite what he’d thought at first when they met. This is the man who killed for him, who drinks his tea, who fought in battlefields and cured countless people, who fucks him hard and feels ashamed and aroused by it simultaneously, the man who will only sigh as Sherlock disrupts his dates and relationships but will scream at him for being careless with himself. And right now, that man is not really in front of him, he’s somewhere else, but his body’s there. And Sherlock wants him to be there, all of him, and it’s not about love, Sherlock doesn’t work that way, but it’s an assuring presence of someone who’s still there, even though they know him, and still fucks with him, even though they’ve seen him desperate for it, his usual coolness stripped away. And in that moment Sherlock very much wants John to fuck him. John should be awake and do that, really.

It takes some more calling of John’s name and shaking of John’s body before John’s slowly becoming present. His eyes are gradually opening and his body is now moving like a body should move while it’s waking up. John meets his eyes, but John’s not really all there yet, but after a few minutes, John is there.

John is there, he’s dazed and irritated and he’s shouting at Sherlock to leave his bed. It’s seemingly about Sherlock waking him up in the dusk of morning, but Sherlock doesn’t really buy that. He is, however, grumpily removing himself from his own bed, and John is still irritated and tense as Sherlock leaves the room wrapped up in a blanket he finds at the end of the bed.

Obviously, there’s even more things about John that Sherlock isn’t supposed to know about than he thought, but that only intrigues him.

The most curious thought is whether John is aware of the time he’s lost while being awake but not present. Sherlock will likely never found out, but finding that out is a goal as good as any to dedicate himself to for the time being.

* * *

 

Sometimes, it’s the movements of John’s eyes that’s the first sign.

Sherlock watches John from the corner of his eye. John is still doing the dishes, but his eyes are all wrong. They’re doing short, rapid movements, like John is watching a very small tennis game. The thing is, John isn’t watching anything at the moment. Sherlock is not quite sure that John can even see anything right now. He’s still cleaning plates and mugs, but his movements are slower and more mechanical than they were minutes ago.

Sherlock no longer bothers to pretend to do other things when John gets like this; he’s learned that as long as he doesn’t make any loud noises or sudden movements, John won’t be aware that he’s even there. Maybe that’s because John isn’t there himself.

It’s fascinating, really, when you think about it. It’s like John has his own Mind Palace, only it’s not filled with useful information and he has little control over when he’s entering or leaving it. Sherlock will probably never know what happens inside John in these moments, and even though he would really like to climb into John’s mind and see what John sees (does he even see anything, or is it all blank?), Sherlock isn’t entirely sure that John would want him to see.

Sherlock watches John from the kitchen table, his slides in his hand, ready to start examining them again as soon as John returns. His lover’s hands are steady, but his aim is a bit off - he has to try several times before he manages to place the wet plate in the dish rack. They're movements he’s so used to that he can go through them without his vision and without being fully conscious, but it takes a little longer to do that way.

After two minutes and forty-five seconds, Sherlock decides that this has gone on for long enough. Sherlock knows that John doesn’t like these episodes even though he never mentions them, and the shorter they are, the less time it seems to take him to return to himself.

Sherlock puts down his slides, picks up a flask then puts it back on the table, making sure it clonks loudly against the flask next to it. He then pushes his chair out from the table, still sitting on it in order to achieve maximum noise as the chair slides a few inches on the wooden floor. He clonks the flasks again, and is rewarded with the sight of John tensing up, then relaxing before tensing up once again.

Sherlock walks over to one of the cupboards next to John and gets a couple of new slides out without looking at him. In the corner of his eye, he sees how John has stopped washing the plate in his hands for a few seconds. As Sherlock returns to his seat, he hears the sound of John resuming the dishes.

Approximately three minutes twenty-five seconds all together. Minutes that passes without John’s awareness. Minutes he’ll have no memory of, minutes he’ll never be sure if he missed or not.

* * *

 

Sherlock is on top of John and they’re kissing lazily, hands stroking along sides and brushing through hair. It’s one of the peculiar additions to their relationship as of lately, this unhurried kissing, and it’s not as panic inducing and terrifying as Sherlock had assumed.

He can have this now.

It’s his.

As is John.

John ought to shower. Sherlock can smell it, and considers directing them both into the shower. John smells of exhaust fumes and old sweat, traces from the last two days spent waiting for suspects to show up in parking garages. Last night John had crawled into bed without even as much as a shower, which was unusual. Sherlock stayed up cataloguing in his Mind Palace until he fell asleep in the early morning, still on the sofa, where John had recently found him. John can’t possibly be well rested yet, and their movements speak both of hunger and lack of sleep.

John’s hands are carding through Sherlock’s curls and it’s always a struggle to keep himself from making sounds that’ll display all to clearly how that affects him. He holds it back, but lets his own hands stroke John’s face as he presses his still only half erect cock against John’s iliac crest.

John smiles, he can feel it against his lips as he absentmindedly strokes their tongues together. He wonders why John smiles, neither of them has said or done anything remotely amusing.

He’s just beginning to feel how John is now also hardening slowly against him when he hears the sudden _bang_ from somewhere outside, probably the street or a nearby apartment. He feels himself tense for a second before he realises that the loud and sudden sound holds no threat, it’s just a car backfiring or something hitting steel hard.

Below him, John doesn’t flinch. John is a soldier and sometimes it bothers Sherlock that in some aspects, John’s got more discipline over his body than Sherlock has over his.

Sherlock resumes the kissing, pressing against his boyfriend, feeling how limbs and skin start to tingle, the effect of the hormones that are rushing through his blood as his genitals are stimulated by the pressure and the erectile tissue of his oral cavity is stimulated simultaneously, increasing the effect.

He wants their clothes off and their skin in contact and he wonders how this will end. Will the laziness from the kisses resume all through the sex or will it turn more heated and rough as John’s arousal begins to match his own? He hopes so. They’ve had lazy sex and it was stimulating and it worked, but it didn’t turn his brain off and it didn’t make him hypersensitive the same way as their usual sex does: being all wrapped up in not knowing how the next touch will feel or how much he can take.

He rises slightly, a hand against the sofa cushion next to John’s face, preparing to sit up in order to strip them bare. Or almost bare. There’s always a certain appeal to the thought of not managing to fully undress before being taken.

It’s just as he’s sitting up between John’s knees that he notices that John is still underneath him, is still moving against him, but he’s no longer fully present.

 _Oh._ This again.

It takes a few seconds before he resumes kissing John, lowering himself back on top of him. There’s no need to undress anymore, really.

John is kissing him back, but now that he’s aware of it, he notices that the movements of John’s hands are more automatic and distant, and that there’s no real heat behind it all. It works, still, and Sherlock allows himself a few more minutes of kissing.

There had been that one time when they’d had sex during which John was slightly distanced and that will never happen again. There’s nothing even remotely intriguing about fucking with someone whose eyes are empty afterwards. It has nothing to do with sentiment on Sherlock’s part, not really, it’s just that looking back it had felt like he’d masturbated with another person's body as an aid. He hadn’t realized something was not quite right until afterward, when he’d looked at John and suddenly understood why John had been unusually quiet while rutting against him and why John’s movements had seemed a bit automatic. He had failed to notice when his friend had gone from being present and wanting in every cell to only being able to experience it from a distance.

This time, he’d seen it.

John will most likely remember this later. He usually does when his eyes are not moving so rapidly and he’s still able to initiate things, even if he’s more passive than he is when he’s not distant. This is one of the things they never speak of, not really. Sherlock has learned the tells and the triggers, has learned when John is likely to remember things afterward and when he’s simply losing minutes completely.

In its own peculiar way, it’s intriguing. There are minutes that passes in John’s life that only Sherlock will remember and there are minutes of John’s life that he’ll remember, but the memory will look more like something John’s seen on the television than something John’s actually taken part in himself. John said as much once, but they’ve never talked about it again.

There are minutes that pass outsides John’s timeline. Some of these minutes are painful, because John is back at a place he’d been earlier, recalling pain or fear. Some of these minutes seem to be blank, just time passing, leaving no impressions or feelings, just a disruption in John’s otherwise well organized timeline. Some of these minutes are just partially outside the timeline, a bit obscured or distant, but still clear enough to leave a memory.

This is probably one of those times. John will remember Sherlock’s tongue in his mouth, his hands caressing and the weight of Sherlock’s body against his. Perhaps John will return fully to himself in the next few minutes and they’ll pretend that neither of them noticed the jump on John’s timeline. Because even if this is something they rarely talk about, there are rules to this as well as to any other aspect of this relationship of theirs. Sherlock’s damaged in some aspects, John in others. They acknowledge this balance by not acknowledging all of the damage done.

Because the frail balance of what’s taking form between them is gradually growing less fragile, but it’ll take years, a lifetime, to secure this balance fully.

They have time. For now.


End file.
